US industrial policy
A 25% chip tariff, a fatter CHIPS credit, and $1.7 trillion of announced factories. Announcements are not wafers. Intel’s stock is not the policy book.
In January the United States put a 25% tariff on the chips that run the AI buildout — H200s, MI325Xs, that class — and carved out anyone whose silicon supports a factory on American soil. The rate is the stick. The exemption is the point.
A US–Taiwan deal names $250 billion of Taiwanese tech investment into American semiconductor, energy, and AI plants. The CHIPS Act’s Section 48D investment tax credit, fattened in the One Big Beautiful Bill signed July 4, 2025, went from 25% to 35%. Construction has to start by December 31, 2026, or the credit is gone. The Semiconductor Industry Association and seventeen trade groups have already written Congress asking for more time. About $640 billion of announced domestic fab investment is anchored to that credit.
Things are not going back to normal… Trade barriers are going up, they’re not coming down.
Michael Zezas, Morgan Stanley, June 2026
Zezas is the bank’s public-policy strategist. Voters, he said, no longer see the value in the old Washington consensus — free trade, a government that stays out, multilateral institutions. The regime is durable. His own caveat is the one that matters for a portfolio: policy calls are hard to translate directly into investment outcomes.
The announcement book
As of May 26, 2026, the US manufacturing-commitment tracker stood at $1.743 trillion. Semiconductors and advanced tech were $1.217 trillion of that, across 140 companies and 35 states. The named top of the book: Apple $600 billion, Micron $200 billion, IBM $150 billion, TSMC $100 billion, Texas Instruments $60 billion, Johnson & Johnson $58 billion.
Named commitments in the book
Announced dollars, not capacity. Tracker as of May 26, 2026, on the tariff-shield chain.
Some of it is becoming concrete. TSMC’s Arizona 3-nanometer line is ahead of schedule, with production slated for 2027 — the most advanced node yet on US soil, and already exempt from the 25% tariff. Micron broke ground on a $100 billion New York fab, the largest single-facility private manufacturing bet in the country, with $35 billion of the 48D credit locked in. On top of the one-time investment credit sits 45X, a production tax credit of four to five cents per wafer-square-centimeter: it pays when chips actually come off the line.
Reshoring construction spending is not keeping pace with the headline. Semiconductor fab construction was down about 44 percent from its July 2024 peak in one May 2026 read — a caution against treating every press release as capacity. NDAA FY2026 Section 5949 expanded the procurement ban on foreign adversary chipmakers to include CXMT alongside SMIC and YMTC, pushing government demand toward US-domiciled alternatives.
Intel is on the beneficiary list. The stock is not the book. On August 11 it closed at $97.71, 31.4% off its 52-week high.
July 1 came and went
The January proclamation told Commerce to send the President, by July 1, an update on semiconductors used in American data centers — so he could decide whether to change the tariff. That is a report date, not a switch that flips Phase 2 on by itself. July 1 passed. As of late August the fetched official indexes show no public readout of that report and no Federal Register notice that amends Proclamation 11002. The published rule is still the one from January: 25 percent on the narrow set, data-center and other listed end-uses still exempt.
A freight blog dated July 19 says the report “has now been delivered.” It links no document. A hardware-trade post from July 17 says the deadline passed and the decision sits with the President, and that a Federal Register notice proposing Phase 2 scope is the expected next step. That notice had not appeared in the fetched official indexes by August 25. Delivery to the President can be true and still leave no citable text — the same shape as the April 14 negotiation update. Do not flatten “delivered” into “Phase 2 started,” and do not flatten silence into “Commerce missed the date.”
August 6 brought a different Section 232, on polysilicon and solar-derivative feedstock. It cites 11002 as the still-operative finding that the United States must scale domestic chip production. It does not rewrite the chip tariff. Offset-program mechanics are still unpublished. The question on the wiki stays a hypothesis.